Blood, Toil, Tears and Sand

By

Tim Jeal

July 13, 2012 4:27 p.m. ET

Between 1850 and 1855, Heinrich Barth, a driven and self-absorbed young German scholar, traveled 10,000 miles from Tripoli across the burning Sahara and through what are now Nigeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. His journey was an epic of survival. Two of his four European companions perished during the expedition and a third died soon after it ended. Barth once came so close to dying of thirst that he cut his arm and drank his blood.

In "A Labyrinth of Kingdoms," Steve Kemper has written the first, and long overdue, biography in English of this remarkable man. "Barth's feats rival, if not surpass, those of the most famous names in nineteenth-century travel," Mr. Kemper claims, and at a time when eastern Mali, including the fabled city of Timbuktu, with its Sufi shrines and ancient libraries, is being vandalized by the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar Dine, Barth's travels have a new relevance.

The small party that Barth had joined was mounted by the British Foreign Office and tasked with signing trade agreements with rulers in the southern Sahara. Its leader, James Richardson, was an English nonconformist minister who loathed the Arab and internal African slave trade and hoped to curb it by enabling Africans to buy Western goods with their own agricultural produce rather than with slaves.

The expedition also carried out ethnological and geographical research, with which Barth, who was a talented linguist as well as a scientist, and another German, Adolf Overweg, were entrusted. They were cool to each other and to Richardson, whom they found self-righteous though genuinely altruistic. Barth possessed exceptional empathy and openness with Africans but got along badly with Europeans. So the three whites often traveled apart. But they were together in August 1850 when Tuareg brigands in the Sahara ordered their camel-riding escort to surrender up "the Christians," who bravely refused to embrace Islam to save their lives. After some terrifying hours they managed to pay off the Tuaregs.

From the fertile southern borders of the Sahara, Barth traveled to the great emporium of Kano, in what is now Nigeria, where markets were laden with goods of every kind, including "half-starved slaves torn from their native homes . . . arranged in rows like cattle." Bound for Lake Chad, Barth then entered country fought over by warring emirs. Towns were burning, thieves were everywhere and people were terrified of enslavement. Meanwhile, an ailing Richardson was near Kukawa, 400 miles east of Kano, where he saw brutal slave-hunts, or "razzias." This shock hastened his demise; Overweg died a year later, probably from malaria. Barth took both men's deaths coolly.

A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

By Steve Kemper

Norton, 415 pages, $28.95

ENLARGE

A map comparing the routes of previous travelers with that of the Richardson expedition, with portraits of (clockwise from top left) the leader, James Richardson; Adolf Overweg; Eduard Vogel and Heinrich Barth. Only Barth survived.
Augustus Heinrich Petermann

In April 1851, Barth reached the kingdom of Bornu, which had been in decline for 50 years, after four centuries as the principal Islamic religious and trading center in what would become northeastern Nigeria. There he discovered histories written by African scholars in Arabic, a language Barth knew well. These would provide European historians with the first documentary proof that Africa had had its own ancient civilizations.

Barth liked Bornu's vizier, Haj Beshir, despite accompanying him on a razzia during which "not less than one hundred and seventy full-grown men were . . . allowed to bleed to death, a leg having been severed from the body." Their crime was resisting the enslavement of themselves and their families. Describing this ghastly scene in his account of the trip, Barth included a detailed description of the physiognomy of the dying men. He added dispassionately: "Nothing can be more disheartening to the feelings of the traveller . . . [than] when the original inhabitants are exterminated . . . and when no-one is left to acquaint him with the significant . . . features of the landscape." Mr. Kemper comments that Barth "didn't wallow in moral outrage." I'll say!

Barth's principal geographical achievement was reaching the Benue (the Niger's largest tributary) in 1851 and proving it unconnected to Lake Chad. He had also hoped to find the source of the Nile, which was not glimpsed by a European until 11 years later. But ill-supplied and suffering from heat exhaustion, he abandoned this plan and instead headed west for Timbuktu, becoming the third European to visit the city. During his seven-month stay, attempts were made to abduct Barth, but his knowledge of Islam and his debating skills kept him alive, as did his friendship with the sympathetic ruler, Sheikh Bakay.

Equally dangerous was his attempt to repeat part of the ill-fated navigation five decades earlier of the Niger River by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Soon after, he survived a second Sahara crossing on his way back to Libya, whence he returned to London in August 1855.

Mr. Kemper has written an enjoyable account of Barth's great journey packed with arresting details, but he does not quite capture his strange subject. His reliance on a new translation of Barth's brother-in-law's biography of him, rather than on Barth's original papers in Hamburg, may be partly to blame. In a two-page canter through his childhood, for example, we are given no clue what it might have been in Barth's upbringing that made him so detached.

Whenever the adult Barth is sympathetic toward Africans, Mr. Kemper approves, but he greets any momentary lapse with horror. Barth was sometimes intemperate, calling legendary Timbuktu, despite its Islamic libraries, "this stupid little city of the desert" and reviling the local people: "A traveller in these countries is no better than a slave, dependent on the caprice of people without intelligence." Though Barth had earlier been robbed, been ill, imprisoned and delayed in searing heat, Mr. Kemper demands to know why, as an uninvited European, he dared expect "better treatment" or had such an unwarranted "sense of entitlement." Wasn't he just expressing very human frustration and exaggerating, as we all do when angry?

Mr. Kemper's tendency to show Europeans as less moral than Africans is understandable given the Atlantic slave trade and the later Scramble for Africa. But in the context of the strife-torn regions through which Barth traveled, Mr. Kemper's empathy can lead him to view the African pre-colonial scene through rose-tinted spectacles. He stresses Islam's undoubted cultural benefits to Africans but plays down the way in which again and again in Islamic history jihads have "given way to the priority of prey," as Ronald Segal puts it in his seminal "Islam's Black Slaves" (2001).

Barth witnessed many crimes against humanity that, had they been committed by Europeans, would be notorious today. But after describing the butchery of unresisting pagans by African Muslims, Mr. Kemper often reduces the impact by pointing out, for instance, that European history is littered with massacres and savage punishments. Certainly white writers about Africa are usually happier recording European crimes, such as the 1904 massacre of the Herero in South-West Africa (now Namibia) or King Leopold's rape of the Congo, rather than indigenous atrocities, but what Barth saw was by any standards a terrible crime. A minimum of 10,000 slaves were transported annually across the Sahara by Africans and Arabs throughout the 19th century, and many times that number were killed during the razzias. Often such captives did their best to be left behind in the desert, though this meant certain death.

Yet despite recording such facts, Mr. Kemper expresses simple nostalgia for the lost "labyrinth of kingdoms," lamenting that Barth "was among the last Europeans to witness them before the onslaught of colonialism. Within fifty years the empires he visited and wrote about—Bornu, Sokoto, Gwandu . . .—were gone." Mr. Kemper's regret for their passing seems to owe more to political correctness than to analysis. The kingdoms had been great centers of Muslim learning and sophisticated trading centers over the centuries, but Barth saw them in terminal decline, bringing misery to many thousands. In Barth's time, Bornu was, Mr. Kemper concedes, "a kingdom in decay, rotted by sloth, waste, avarice and devotion to pleasure." In a revealing buried note, he lets slip that the murderous "Janjaweed's tactics [in modern Darfur] resembled the vizier's of Bornu during a razzia—shoot, kill, rape, loot, and then burn everything to debilitate survivors."

So would "the onslaught of colonialism" intensify the suffering in Bornu and Sokoto (the largest kingdom in Barth's day), as Mr. Kemper's phrase implies? Tucked away in Mr. Kemper's notes is his admission that Sokoto has not actually "gone," being today "the locus of religious power . . . [where] the sultan . . . is still the head of Islam in the region." This longevity was because Britain's policy of "indirect rule"—which was delivered in Northern Nigeria in 1903 by a cadre of only 40 political officers and their few assistants—inevitably involved ruling through the African sultans and endorsing Islam as the region's religion. Although Frederick Lugard, Britain's first High Commissioner in Northern Nigeria, conquered Sokoto and outlawed the brutal razzias at once, he knew that most domestic slaves were not ill-treated and that slavery as an institution was legal for Muslims. So rather than suddenly free the slaves and leave them to starve without work, he proceeded gradually, adopting the Islamic practice by which slaves could buy their freedom from their owners with their earnings.

Mr. Kemper is wrong to say that Barth's "feats" equaled those of David Livingstone, the first European to cross Africa and explore the upper Congo and the Zambezi above Victoria Falls; or John Hanning Speke, the "discoverer" of Lake Victoria and the Nile's source; or Henry Morton Stanley, the first to circumnavigate Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and follow the Congo to the Atlantic. Barth's odyssey was also diminished by earlier explorers' traversals of the same territory, such as the 1822-25 journey to Bornu and Hausaland by Walter Oudney, Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, and the navigation of the Niger by Park, Clapperton and Richard Lander.

Barth's greatness rests on his encyclopedic and authoritative five-volume "Travels and Discoveries" (1857-58), which Mr. Kemper rightly exalts but quotes insufficiently to convey its qualities. He highlights Barth's conversations with Africans, for instance, but none are quoted at sufficient length to enable us to compare them with, say, Livingstone's dispute with the rainmaker in "Missionary Travels" (1857), in which the rainmaker's highly intelligent arguments are set out over several pages with fairness and detachment.

Mr. Kemper holds the British partly responsible for Barth's obscurity, even though he—unlike Livingstone, Speke or Burton—was awarded the C.B., one of Britain's highest honors short of a knighthood. He was welcomed by the prime minister and the foreign secretary when he returned from his travels. Speke, Burton and Stanley were not. He received (as they did) the Royal Geographical Society's Gold Medal. British readers did not, as Mr. Kemper suggests, shun his magnum opus because he portrayed Africans and Muslims sympathetically but because they found it overlong and dull. Livingstone wrote lovingly about Africans, and Burton eulogized Arabs, and their books sold well. British Nonconformists and Quakers, and supporters of the mass campaign to abolish slavery, were hugely influential in the 1850s. Even Palmerston, the Tory prime minister who greeted Barth, opposed new African colonies. There was no British anti-Barth plot, although he could be remarkably prickly. He is neglected because he made no startling geographical discoveries and because discovery rather than scholarship (unless on the Darwinian scale) is what confers lasting status upon travelers.

—Mr. Jeal is the author of "Livingstone," "Stanley" and "Explorers of the Nile."

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